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"When they allow a talk show host to play them like a two-dollar banjo, they demonstrate what kind of backbone they'll bring to the job later on, if we elect them. After they get elected will they continue to allow Jeff Crank to put a nickel in them and wind them up every Saturday morning?"

Barry Noreen, former columnist, Colorado Springs Gazette

"There's a lot of talent there" - Shannon Fowler

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

KITING PAPER

By Robert Harkins

September 9, 2009

KITE

Informal: a fraudulent check, bill, or receipt. An illicit or surreptitious letter or note. Archaic: a person who exploits or preys on others. Oxford Dictionary.

The O’bama Administration, in no less than its first eight months in office, has imposed on the American people a debt greater than that of all previous administrations together since the creation of the United States. It is a debt, entailing billions in interest, that will not be paid during our life or the life our children. It is a nearly unquenchable debt that will reduce American prosperity, quality of life and the once attainable hopes of new American generations. It is a debt that will savage American business and its ability to compete with the new, vigorous, and ironically, more capitalist nations of Asia, Russia and Brazil.It is an adventurous squander of trillions that is far worse than the disease the Administration assures us it will cure.

As if unquenchable debt were not enough, the President’s Cap & Trade Bill— directed to the eradication of a specious, and scientifically aberrant theory of global warming— will be the largest single tax increase in American history. The federal government’s vast confiscation of private American wealth will forever be drawn from all Americans; and for the 95% of Americans who may have bought the President’s promise, faithfully made, that they will be kept safe from all tax increases, there will be betrayal, sore disappointment and higher taxes. In the scores of speeches in which the President pitched and pitches still an ambitious and suspect expansion of federal power, he insists that the calculated intrusion of government into once private American life and its printing of money— that is, by the committing of American generations to the payment of trillions in deficit debt and burgeoning interest—the cost of health care and ultimately, the national deficit itself will decline. The President’s promise, long since repudiated by the Congressional Budget Office, is predicated on quaint and wishful analysis, transparently fictional forecasts of a stimulus related increase in jobs and GDP, on amorphous savings neither the President, Congress or the Senate when questioned will identify, and on the elimination of fraud and waste, an old government siren song sung off-tune as a preclude to a symphony of new taxes, inflation and governmental intrusion in to the life, privacy and freedom of every American; and finally, upon Chicago politics as new to most Americans as it is an old and familiar corruption to those who call Chicago their home.

In response to Constitutionally protected protest and justifiable American anger, the President and his Administration have answered Americans with slanderous accusations and raucous shouts of contempt. Congressional leaders and Senators have characterized Americans as Nazis, Evil Mongers, cross-burning Klanners and Red Necks. The President of the United States has characterized Americans as Fabricators, and Disseminators of Misinformation, a vapid euphemism for the word “Liar.”The attack on American protesters has been launched by Congressional leaders, by the President himself, by legions of dependants, a tame, subservient and corrupt “mainstream media,” by union minions and radicals of various and recognizable stripes.

In response to the unprecedented American protest of the President’s intention to impose on Americans a government takeover of health care, and despite polls which show overwhelming American opposition, the President and Speaker of the House, apparently intend to force the government take-over of heath care on Americans with or without Republican support and if necessary by resort to what has become known as Reconciliation or the Nuclear Option. What they cannot take by consensus, they will take by resort to slick propaganda and the wielding of procedural brass knuckles.

The truth is that the real purveyors of disinformation are the Congress, Senate and the Office of President. For example, the President’s push to pass the incomplete and unread health care bill into law before the August recess plainly exposes his intention that no one, not the members of Congress, the Senate or the American people would have a chance to read its thousand pages of legalese or debate its provisions. His belated invitation to debate, as if debate had always been his idea in the first place, came only after American protests and consequently, his failure to secure passage of the bill into law before anyone could read it. That he could now suggest that the idea of debate was his or that he has always been ready to go over the health care plan line by line, demonstrates a brash presidential chutzpah!

In an unprecedented struggle for supremacy between two rugged adversaries one the American people and the other, incredibly, their own Government— and two competing theories of governance, one a Constitutional Republic and the other Socialism renamed the Welfare State—perhaps the most malignant damage done will be inflation and the devaluation of the dollar. Already, the United Nations is calling for the creation of a reserve currency to replace the dollar, and China is now inexorably selling off American Treasury bonds.

The printing of money to finance government services by deficit spending constitutes a double tax on the American people.This government knows well, as do all governments, new and ancient, the causal connection between deficit spending, inflation and the confiscation of private wealth — a law of economics equal in force to the law of gravity in physics. This government, however, is more than willing to live with the consequences of inflation despite the will of the American people.

In 1923, the French occupied the Ruhr Valley where Germany had concentrated a major part of its potent manufacturing capacity. German workers in the Ruhr Valley went on strike. The German government, then nearly bankrupt, paid their wages in marks turned out by the billions on government printing presses. Inflation followed the printing of marks and destroyed the German economy. Germans citizens, desperate to acquire something or anything of value as the mark became inexorably worthless, immediately purchased almost anything. Desperate buying forced prices rapidly upward. Nevertheless, a bankruptgovernment continued to print and finally killed its currency and economy.

What then did the Germans do with the German mark? Adults tied them into the rough shape of logs which they burnt in their fireplace so as to stay warm |through a brutal winter. Parents also had plenty of marks to give their children. The children glued them together in sheets, cut them neatly to fit the crossed wooden ribs to which they tied a rag tail. Then running with the speed and grace that only children can maintain, and laughing, as children laugh with such pure and innocent joy, the German children flew their kites high upon the winter wind.

It is a fleeting mercy that tragedy sometimes passes high above the understanding of children.